Despite this being week 2 of sickness, only one person in the family seems to have fully recovered. That’s the child who brought it home and gave it to everyone. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

As a result, everyone has been dragging, sniffling, coughing, sneezing, medicating, coughing some more… I had the Lysol spray out this morning treating doorknobs and other surfaces, hoping to kill off some of those germs. I figure anything will help.

My word count has been dismal. I’m participating in the write a book in a month challenge hosted by Deanna Lee at Cobblestone Press. Luckily I’m just writing a tryst. I’m 3400 words into a 15K novella. If I can stop coughing and/or blowing my nose, I should be able to spit out 12K more by the 31st.

Writer’s are people too…we all have lives outside of the books we write, some lives may be idyllic and some fraught with pitfalls. My major pain in the butt is an ex-husband. Drama Teen is the child from that union…I’ve posted her a little about her troubles with her bio dad and his new wife. For the past 1.5 years, things have been more than a little rocky with them. Just this past week, I made an appointment with an attorney to see what needs to be done to clarify some of the child custody terms and make them more favorable to our sixteen year old daughter being able to make the decision of when and where to see him.

I wrote a huge open letter to him this morning, just to get a few things out in the open. I probably won’t ever mail it. He doesn’t have “the time” to read “drivel” from me, and honestly, I just needed to get the words on paper so they were no longer jumping around in my head, competing for attention with my WIP. However, I thought this last part was simply too witty (and true) for it to go to waste. So, for your entertainment, I’ll post it here…

To my ex-husband —

You have called for the past two mornings, not to talk to our daughter but to ask ME a favor. What about the word EX-WIFE do you not understand? What burns me the most is NOT you trying to charm our daughter with flowers and gifts. Hell, I expect that. However, did you HONESTLY think I was going to be an accomplice in getting you back into our daughter’s good graces? You screwed up the relationship, you need to make it right.

So, you mailed her a package and put the wrong address on it? Do you HONESTLY think I’m going to fix the problem to make YOU, the looser dead beat ex-husband, look like a hero? SNORT. I don’t think so!

UPDATE: The story gets EVEN better. When he first called yesterday, the Ex- reeled off the tracking number to Mr. Wonderful who scrawled it down on a post-it note. After we discussed our non-action on the issue, we discarded the post-it (trash pickup was about 9 am this morning). About noon today, I get another call from the ex-. He needs the routing number of the gift HE SENT through UPS so that he can change the delivery address. Could we please let him know what it is? WTF!?! You ordered it…why don’t you have the tracking number? Repeat, what about EX-WIFE do you not understand????

Now, in case you’re wondering, this man, my ex-, will be 50 years old in a few weeks. A half a century of ineptitude. Where is Darwin when you need him?